Your comment raises some really good points, one of which is that address information is actually public information. It is interesting to me how in the last sa

Your comment raises some really good points, one of which is that address information is actually public information. It is interesting to me how in the last say 30 years this information, which used to be just considered a basic fact, has become highly sensitized. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. But consider that virtually all municipalities make property records public by default, which was historically as a matter of public interest. Historically they made voter registration records public as well (this now varies by locality or state) which covers renters. If you think about it, it didn't used to be very practical to keep your address highly private because so much information came by mail, so you'd end up sharing your address more widely with friends but even acquaintances. Without mobile phones it could be onerous to set up a meeting away from home if there was any likelihood it would need to be rescheduled at the last second. I believe (with no hard evidence) that "swing by my place and we'll go from there" used to be much more common, by necessity. It was routine for personal home addresses to be listed with the name of the occupant in widely distributed phone books. You could opt out of this by the time I was a kid. These days it might be considered doxing for a company to disseminate this information by default! I do not think we should have to keep those norms forever, of course, but if we are going to start treating addresses as highly privileged maybe we should more intentional and methodical about it. It would mean trying to answer the question of "how do we preserve the public interest in knowing who owns a piece of land in a municipality, particularly when there is a complaint, an environmental concern, a tax policy question that is hard to answer without knowing who owns all the land in an area, etc." Another good point you make is that SSNs are dangerous not in and of themselves but because of how they can be used. Like you said, they can be cross referenced if overcollected to build tracking profiles. But also, in the U.S., they have been improperly overloaded as an authentication token, so they have been made dangerous by misuse. But ideally we'd have a system where there is little/no danger in having your SSN exposed.